Thus, standing a few feet apart, they stripped. She avoided looking at him, except that she snuck a few glances. He was hairier than she’d have guessed, though not in a bad way, and while she’d known he was fit, he was practically sculpted; if she’d previously realized just how perfectly muscled he was, she might have been too intimidated to make this overture.
Then his body was pressed up against hers, they were kissing—never having participated in hate sex, she was glad to learn kissing was part of it—and the naked standing-up kissing went on for a while, accompanied by roaming hands, and at some point, an air conditioner kicked on with a forceful whirring, and after another interval, a cacophony of car horns was audible through the apartment’s closed windows, out in the sunny evening populated by people who weren’t, for the most part, kissing each other while standing up naked. Then either he nudged her toward the bed or she pulled him, and soon after that he removed the condom from the drawer of his nightstand. All in all, the experience was highly satisfying, certainly for her, and judging by external clues, it seemed reasonable to conclude for him as well; without question, it was far more enjoyable than prom night with Phillip Haley or most other couplings she’d partaken of in the twenty years following. Indeed, one sign of just how agreeable she found the interaction was that she was only vaguely aware of the identity of the person with whom she was sharing it. At the beginning, the preposterousness of this proximity to Darcy—Fitzwilliam Darcy!—had distracted her and then again at the end, as she emerged from the delirious haze in which they’d mutually collapsed. It was as she returned to herself that it occurred to her to wonder whether what they were doing counted as cuddling; surely, even if hate sex permitted kissing, cuddling was a violation. She rolled away and sat up, reaching to find her clothes on the floor.
She could feel his gaze but waited to look at him until she was fully dressed in her damp and reeking shirt and shorts. Finally making eye contact, she said, “I’ll let myself out.”
As it happened, they had never made it under the bedspread but instead conducted their entire transaction atop it. In that moment, both his hands were set behind his head, and his long, hairy, muscular body was exposed. There was on his face an expression difficult to read, and she felt determined not to blush. “See you around,” she said.
Was he amused? Perturbed? Bewildered? It was impossible to know. “Indeed,” he replied.
LIZ WAS WRITING a check from her bank account to the contractor when she received the text from Jasper. The contractor had scraped away the bubbling, flaking paint from the water stain in the living room, then covered the wall with primer and a coat of mustard-colored paint from the can Liz had, to her surprise and delight, unearthed during her basement excavations. The source of the water stain, the contractor informed her with such reticence that it occurred to Liz he feared offending her by drawing attention to her stupidity, was that the roof gutters were all overflowing with leaves, which created flooding during rainstorms. “Keeping your gutters clean is a good thing to do,” he said gently.
In its entirety, Jasper’s text said Awesome! and provided a link to an article about a man in Nebraska who had unsuccessfully tried to shoplift a snake from a pet store. Jasper was taking her temperature, Liz knew. He wanted to see where things stood between them. She didn’t respond.
SHANE’S COLLEAGUE’S CLIENTS were scheduled to visit the Tudor between two and three on Monday afternoon, which meant the house’s inhabitants needed to be elsewhere. After arranging for Mary to take their father to the Mercantile Library (“I already did that last week,” Mary said, and Liz said, “Exactly. It’s called pulling your weight”), Liz had requested that Lydia, Kitty, and Mrs. Bennet accompany her to the Kenwood mall to help her select an outfit in which to interview Kathy de Bourgh. This seemed to Liz such a transparently obvious excuse that she was surprised by how readily they agreed to it.
She was inside a dressing room, wearing a blue wraparound dress, when, at two twenty-five, which was far earlier than she’d expected, she received a call from Shane. “They love it,” he said. “They’re making an offer tonight, which obviously will be contingent on the inspection.”
Looking at herself in the mirror—her dark hair, the expensive dress that didn’t belong to her, her bare legs and feet—Liz actually smiled. “Thank you, Shane,” she said. “This is such great news.”
IT WASN’T THAT Liz had changed her mind about Darcy’s essentially disagreeable nature; rather, she had concluded that a romp or two in his bed would neither diminish nor exacerbate his disagreeability, especially if she discussed it with no one, even Jane.